What makes Google's bigtable so BIG
While much of the focus on what has come to be called cloud computing has been on vast server farms and the technical underpinnings of trying to search all the world's web content, the database that underlies the cloud has received a lot less attention.
Big Table is an ongoing research project to create a structured database that will operate in a distributed environment. This is no easy project as databases have traditionally been most efficient and most secure when running on some big box safely tucked away in some remote data center.
